Descendants of survivors from Murat's vessel have no functional subspace radio—and are completely unaware that the war is over. They have developed their own crude industrial base in order to defend themselves from the equally militant descendants of a crashed Tarn vessel's crew. They have copies of P-51 Mustangwarplanes, copies of M1 Garandrifles, and copies of full body armor and uniforms bearing Starfleet markings. They retain the information necessary to fabricate these things because they make use of the intact databases from their ship. Standing forces who consider themselves to be loyal members of the Federation, fighting for their lives, employ methods such as child soldiers and mass incineration booby traps. They also have and use lethal chemical and biological weapons at a tactical level. The Tarn on the planet, for their part, have recently relearned the fabrication and use of crude low-yield tactical nuclear weapons. They not only do not know that the war between the Tarn and Federation is over, but they also do not know that the Federation-Klingon war is over.

Both combatant groups have suffered extreme psychological anguish, and are extremely bloodthirsty and intransigent. Verdun crew descendants, for example, feel contempt for Riker and the other Enterprise personnel when they learn that these strangers have not earned their ranks through promotion for killing many Klingons in battle—furthermore, they find that these others do not derive pleasure from extreme violence. Soon, armed vessels from both sides arrive, standing ready to re-ignite the larger war between the Tarn and the Federation in order to "save" their respective citizens fighting on the planet below. The situation is finally resolved when Jean-Luc Picard and Harna Karish agree to each simultaneously give strategic mass destruction weapons to the opposing side in the fighting below. This creates a situation in which it finally becomes possible to get each side to cease hostilities and agree to be evacuated.

Many notes from the book seem to depict a belief that the Tarn Wars were an occurrence of the era of The Original Series, such as the uniform colors, the uniform pictured on the cover and descriptions of miniskirt uniforms and rank insignia as well as the mentions of Captain Pike and the original Constitution class Enterprise. This is in contradiction to the dating information, which places events in the mid 22nd century, two hundred years prior to the TNG era the book is set in, and one hundred years prior to TOS. It is possible that the authors were unfamiliar with the Star Trek timeline, or that the book had been heavily re-edited to remove information that could be seen as contradictory to TOS continuity.

A very vague reference creates a possibility that Picard was considered to have been a relative or descendant of Captain Murat, in that Picard tells Midshipman Forsyth that he had an ancestor who played chess with the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Marshal Joachim Murat is noted to have been one of Napoleon's chess opponents. In real life, Murat is a direct ancestor of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine star Rene Auberjonois through his mother.